Let's Go Outside

A couple of months ago, I showed you some photos of our ivy-covered trees.  Quick reminder:

We didn't take any real "before" photos, and what you're looking at here is my husband after an hour of bushwhacking to get in there as far as he is.  To imagine a true "before," picture the ivy that's surrounding Ray coming all the way to the ground.  There are a couple of other things to which I'd like to draw your attention in this photo:  see all the small trees sprouting up to Ray's left?  The bald, grass-less patch (where a random clump of bamboo used to be) behind him?  And the branches popping out of the ivy at the top right?  How about all the ivy growing on the ground-- see that?  And that tiny sliver of red to Ray's right-- it's our neighbors' garage.


Okay, well here's a shot I took today after lunch of the same spot:

Yes, that is is the same view.

First things first: what we've done.  

Ray has spent every free minute attacking the ivy in what we thought might be a too-late attempt to save the trees.  Good news: they're both alive!  Bad news: they're really weirdly shaped because the ivy was strangling their trunks.  Good news: the one on the left appears to be a healthy cherry tree!  Bad news: mature fruit trees = rats.  More bad news: somebody limbed the tree a million years ago and the fruit will be way too high for us to reach.  Even more bad news: the neighbors' garage isn't fully painted.  We didn't know that before.  Because we literally couldn't see it.  Still more bad news: we're going to have to replace that fence.  Obviously.  

We've also uprooted all those saplings and spent hours of our lives pulling ivy roots out of the ground-- some of them were easily 15ft long.  

This picture (featuring the right-hand tree) was taken in the middle of the process, just to give you some idea of what we were up against:

We've also seeded the bald patch where the bamboo used to be, and it's filling in nicely.  Today we seeded the dirt you see in the second photo-- where before there was nothing but ivy, there will now be lush green grass.

Here's another view (taken from our covered patio two months ago):

And a view from the same vantage point this afternoon:

 

Here's another view from the covered patio today.  Behold our verdant kingdom!

 All the dirt you see there was covered with ivy in the very recent past.

And speaking of our covered patio, we're making lots of changes out there and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.  In the meantime, can I get some applause for my incredibly hardworking and handsome husband?

Tristram Chand-y*

Today I dragged Ray to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store and, fifteen minutes later and $17.50 lighter, we left with this baby:

Yes, it's currently hanging in the unkempt covered courtyard outside our kitchen window, where it's awaiting a few thin coats of spraypaint, but its eventual home will be the dining room.  It's going to replace this freak-ass monstrosity:

So, as I've mentioned before, I've been having a lot of trouble deciding what to do about that thing, because the dining room is kind of a tricky space.  It's small, it's basically part of the living room, and it's really visible from every room in the house except the master bedroom and the third bedroom.  I've been looking for something fun and quirky, not too dressy but definitely dining-room-ish, and cheap.  And I kept not finding anything like that.

So I scrapped it all and bought the brass thing.  It was marked $35, but when we arrived at the register with it we found out it was half off.  Score.  I definitely feel okay about experimenting on an $18 light fixture, so let the games begin!

First I removed the giant ball that was at the bottom of it.  Maybe I'll put it back on, but at the moment it's looking like I probably won't.  Then I unscrewed the three curly twirly side pieces than ran vertically down the stem, because I'm not really a twirly-chandelier girl:

 

That's better, no?  Next we took off the shades (we'll probably use them or replace them or maybe cover them with fabric or stencil them or something):

It's lines are okay, and it's a good size for the small dining room-- it's kind of overscaled, but since it's pretty clean it looks like the right size for the table (we took turns holding it up to the ceiling so we could make sure we liked it).

Next I decided to do some experimenting.  I took the ceiling plate off and sprayed it navy blue, then I carried it inside (on a scrap of drywall like a DIY boss) so I could check out the navy color with the rest of the dining room stuff:

 

It's dark and matte, which I think I like.  But after it dried (in the meantime I painted the hallway ceiling, but more on that later) I taped off half of it and sprayed the other half with a glossy gray:

Please don't mind my crappy tape job-- I didn't want to stick the tape down too firmly since I'd just sprayed it a couple of hours before.

At this point we have some options, and I'd love your help with the decision-making (which it definitely not my strong suit).  Here's a photo for reference with a quick glossary so you'll understand what the hell I'm talking about as I explain the options:

 

See those little knobs about halfway down the arms of the chandelier?  We're going call them knobs.  There are also knob-things where each arm meets the stem (see 'em?) and where the candleholder-y things meet the arms.  Without further ado, your options are:

OPTION A: NAUTICAL NAVY

This would involve painting the whole thing matte navy except the aforementioned knobs, which we'd tape off so they would still be brass.  At the moment I'm leaning towards this, as there's a lot of brass in the rest of the house (the original doorknobs, etc), and I kind of like the idea of some exposed metal to give the whole thing a slightly less spraypainted-cheap-chandelier feel.  We would possibly also leave the candleholder portions brass-- so basically we'd be painting the stem and the arms navy.  This version would probably mean keeping the ivory shades or finding more drum-shaped ones in a plain ivory.  Maybe we'd paint a narrow navy or metallic-gold border around the top and bottom of each shade? 

OPTION B: SOLID NAVY

Matte navy all the way.  This would likely involve covering or replacing the shades with something more fun, though I have to be careful with "fun" patterns since I'm already working with two crazy rugs, a kilim ottoman, and ikat-striped chair pads.

OPTION C: DARK GRAY

Solid satin-finish dark gray.  I don't think I'd like the exposed brass knobs with the gray as much as I would with navy, so I think if I go gray it'll be all gray.  Problems with this plan: I'd like to spray the chairs dark gray, and I don't want to be all matchy-matchy chairs and chandelier.  Also, I'm a little worried that it might look like we bought a chandelier that was made of imitation metal or something-- the gray paint might look like faux pewter.  Or it might look totally awesome.  I have no idea, and I can't really tell based upon the half-gray ceiling medallion.  On the other hand, the thing cost $17.50 so if it looks irredeemably terrible I can just sell it for $15 on craigslist and pretty much recoup my entire investment.  Shades or no shades?  I don't know.

OPTION D: BRASS
This option involves not worrying so much about it and just hanging it up as-is.  I'll be honest-- I don't find this option terribly appealing.  But several people whose design opinions I trust (mostly my mom-- she's always right about this stuff) have suggested that I leave it brass because that's probably what was originally here.  A plain ol' brass chandelier is appropriate for a 40's house, doesn't feel too dressy or too casual, won't compete with the rest of the decor, etc etc etc. 

And now for something completely different!**  While I waited for the navy spraypaint on the chandelier's ceiling medallion to dry so I could spray half of it gray, I painted the filthy hallway ceiling with a product that I'd say is probably the second-greatest invention of the modern era (number one being the internet, naturally): ceiling paint that goes on pink and dries white.  That stuff is amazing.  It's not totally dry yet so there are still some disconcerting pink blotches in there, but it is already SO MUCH BETTER than the icky sticky yellowy mess that was up there before.  Slow and steady wins the race!

Please email or comment to weigh in on the chandelier situation.  Can't live with the weird office fixture for for much longer before I die of spontaneous interior-design-related combustion.

*Laurence Sterne joke!
**Monty Python joke!

Shave and a Haircut

No indoor projects to report on this week.  I blame this guy:

You may recognize him from a post way back in October-- he belongs to our friends.  When they go out of town, we always jump at the chance to host him at our place for a few days.  He's incredibly charming and polite, and seriously-- look at that face.

For obvious reasons I've been hesitant to bust out my painting supplies and attack the ceilings in the hallway, bathroom, and guest bedroom (all of which are shiny and yellow, ugh)-- it's just not good form to get paint in your borrowed poodle's lustrous curls.  And I felt weird about sewing with him underfoot too-- what if I dropped a straight pin and he stepped on it?  Am I just using him as an excuse to be lazy?  Maybe.  He likes couch naps almost as much as I do.

But we have been busy.  As I've mentioned before, our house was a rental for several years before we bought it, and during that time the lawn got a little wild completely insane.  When we first moved in, my dad detached a dying honeysuckle bush that was literally tied to the front of the house.  The following week Ray attacked the nine-foot hedge that had been obscuring the house from the street and ripped out the first of three epic clumps of bamboo that were on the chopping block.  Since then, he's pulled out the other two bamboo blobs, cleaned up the overgrowth on the left-hand side of our driveway, cleared the huge impassable thicket of blackberry bushes on the right-hand side of our house (literally, they were so overgrown that he discovered a five-foot-high metal gate hidden in the middle of them), denuded our massive buckeye tree of the ivy that was strangling it, and removed endless bags of leaves from the property.  Lest you wonder what Ray is doing while I'm fixing the bathroom ceiling, look no further than the yard.  Believe me, he's been busy out there.

Flash forward to today, the rarest of all things-- a sunny-ish Oregon winter day.  This is going to sound crazy, but we thought we had these two enormous trees on the left-hand side of our backyard until we discovered yesterday that they are actually two normal-sized (for the Pacific Northwest, anyway) trees that have been completely taken over by ivy.  Our pest-control man told us that the trees underneath would eventually die because of the resource-stealing ivy, and if they fall, our roof is toast.  Today we decided to hack some of the ivy away and try to figure out what we were working with.  Behold:

 

See all those leaves?  They're not from the tree.  They're from the ivy.  You can see some of the tree's branches popping out of the ivy towards the top.  Yeah, we thought the leaves were part of the tree too.  So if you look carefully you can see Ray in there detaching some of the ivy from the left-hand tree with 1) a hand saw, 2) clippers, and 3) a pry-bar.  The pile of ivy behind him represents half an hour of bushwhacking to get as far in as he is in this photo.  Doesn't LeBaron look concerned?

Here's another view:

Yes.  That is ivy.  Two different species, in fact.

Deep in the ivy thicket, Ray encountered a third (much smaller-- maybe 6" in diameter) tree heavily covered with vines.  It was leaning, so we decided to remove it.  Ray cut it in half, and when he tossed it onto the ivy pile, this is what we saw:

 

I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but the tree rotted away a long time ago and is completely hollow-- only its bark, held in place by the roots, remains.  The ivy murdered this little guy.

We decided that the best approach would be to cut the ivy off from its ground-roots by cutting a full circle around the tree-trunk (which was not visible because the roots were covering it so thickly).  Here's what it looked like after Ray cut all the way around it-- see the darker, narrower trunk the in center and the lighter gnarly roots lower down and higher up?

The other thing you're seeing in the photo is our fence, or what's left of it.  Like I said, the ivy was so thick that we'd never seen this section of it.  The ivy has actually pulled the fence out of the ground and is pushing it over into our yard.  Hello, Little Shop of Horrors.

Above is a wider shot of the progress.  That dirt-pile behind Ray was once a huge (maybe 10ft high?) bamboo clump that was just randomly in the middle of the yard for no reason at all-- it'll get grass-seeded in a few weeks.  Anyhow, see all those hanging vines to Ray's right?  See the poodle-butt on the left?  Hehehe.

So this is a totally overwhelming project that will probably take one million years to complete (our town offers yard-waste pickup service once a week, so we've been operating on a fill-the-bin-wait-a-week-fill-the-bin schedule to remove our plentiful yard debris), but we're eventually hoping to make the left side of the backyard match the much-more-civil right side:

Yep, we've got a lot of work to do.  And yes, we see the ivy growing up that tree.  We're on top of it.